u/Mophandel

Art by me

These days, it’s a bit of a cliche in paleoart to reconstruct carcharodontosaurids, if hunting anything at all, as hunting gigantic titanosaurian sauropods, a trend going hand in hand with the idea that carcharodontosaurids were sauropod-specialists, the idea that the wide gape, highly ziphodont teeth and derived neck anatomy, are all in service to hunting the most gigantic animals to ever live. While I do agree sauropods probably did make up the bulk of carch diets and they probably did have a slightly easier time hunting them than other megatheropods, for this piece I wanted to show there was more on the menu for big carchs. After all, there were more giant herbivores on the landscape than just sauropods in middle Cretaceous Gondwana, and the highly “specialist” adaptations of carcharodontosaurids were probably just extremely successfully adaptations for general macropredation as a whole, effective against just about any large unarmored prey in the same way the slicing teeth of a Komodo dragon can be used against a 5 kg monkey and 50 kg deer. Indeed, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and rest assured, with jaws and teeth like that, there’s not much in middle Cretaceous Gondwana that could withstand a hungry carcharodontosaurid, sauropod or otherwise.

For the predator of this piece, I chose Giganotosaurus, for a couple reasons. Firstly, it’s always fun to draw the keratinous texturing on the face, nasals and horns that derived carcharodontosaurines sport. The main reason, however, was that the environment that it was home to, the Candeleros Formation, housed some impressive non-sauropod diversity among its retinue of herbivores, particularly with regards to large, multi-tonne ornithopods.

This segues neatly into discussions about the prey animal of this peice, which is of course the world-renowned Hadrosauriformes indet. Though no skeletal material has been found, ample trackway evidence (e.g., Mazzetta & Blanco, 2001) suggests the presence of a large, roughly Iguanodon-sized ornithopod living alongside Giganotosaurus. Due to the lack of skeletal remains, I had some leeway in how to reconstruct this animal. Though it’s common in paleomedia to reconstruct this animal as close to Iguanadon, I chose not use Iguanodon itself as a reference, as Iguanadon and its ilk are pre-date Giganotosaurus’ time by 11-15 million years and were significantly more basal than those of the giant carnosaurs day and age. By this time in earths history, much more derived ornithopods than Iguanadon had appeared, and were taking on a decidedly more “hadrosaur-like” appearance (e.g. Ouranosaurus). As such, I decided to use one such “derived” ornithopod, specifically the Asian hadrosauroid Altirhinus, as a model. While it was more geographically removed from Giganotosaurus, it was no more so than Iguanadon itself. More importantly, unlike Iguanadon, it was contemporary with Giganotosaurus, and so, in my opinion, represented a more accurate representation of the kind of ornithopod the giant carcharodontosaur would have hunted (plus its head was find to draw and texture).

Photo by Evan Johnson-Ransom

*NOTE: the original uploaded is mistaken in that this is not a case of cannibalism. The preyed upon caiman is either a yacare caiman or spectacled caiman. Not only are both much smaller than black caiman, they are also both different species than the black caiman, and as such, this is not cannibalism.

Art by me